What Kony 2012 Can Teach Us About Ourselves

Invisible Children recently launched what is now the viral video sensation called KONY 2012. The purpose of the video is to make Joseph Kony, the Ugandan leader of the L.R.A. (Lord’s Resistance Army) that has forced children to kill their parents and serve as soldiers, famous for his atrocities. Its goal being to raise global awareness about his crimes to maintain motivation among the U.S. and international community to see him brought to justice.

In light of such controversy, critics posed the question: Is Kony 2012 a sign of how powerful social media can be as a news distribution mechanism, a sign of how dangerous it can be, or both?

One thing is certain. The Invisible Children video stands as another powerful example of the ability of social media to connect citizens around shared values. The Arab Spring Revolutionsenlisted social media to scale messaging around desperate political and economic inequalities, while #occupywallstreet continues to leverage social media to draw attention to economic inequalities around the globe. Underpinning all three movements is a powerful presumption enjoying a new lease on life, that that the future is ours to create.

Invisible children has gone to great lengths to address these concerns on their website, and as the KONY 2012 news cycle plays out, it’s important not to lose sight of the fundamental shift playing out before our eyes. If corrupt and mixed motives among some political, military and business leaders led to a polarization of political, economic and social power around the world, social media is creating a platform on which citizens and customers are working together to confront that gap. So, in contrast to the devastating domino effects of the global economic meltdown in 2008, in these cases social media is being used to demonstrate that our connectedness and interdependence within a global community can also be a force for good.

Success on the scale of Kony 2102 will always bring with it unforgiving scrutiny. Commentators are right to question both the cost of fetishizing social media and also our inability to effectively unpack any complex issue in a single pass. No doubt, as Seth Godin observes, many organizations will naively copy the same strategy hoping for equally dramatic and timely results. But as I watch activists, journalists, historians, politicians, technologists, media experts and regular people all around the world challenge the merits of the video and motives of its makers, one question stands out above all. When you find an injustice that moves you as deeply, will you act?